British Recapture of Trincomalee
- When
- 1795
- Where
- Fortified port city on Ceylon's east coast
- Part of
- Capture of Trincomalee
With the French occupying the Dutch Republic, Britain seized Trincomalee in 1795, renaming it Fort Frederick and claiming to prevent a Napoleonic invasion.
In 1795, after French forces had occupied the Dutch Republic during the War of the First Coalition, the British took over Trincomalee again. The port had been a Dutch possession, described a year earlier by Governor Jacob Burnand as an important fortified town. Britain stated its claimed aim as preventing Napoleon from invading the colony if it stayed under the Dutch. The conquerors renamed the place Fort Frederick and went on to hold the city until Sri Lanka's independence in 1948.
Sources
- Trincomalee Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-27
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.